For many years, electronic gyroscopes have been used in a wide variety of civilian and military aviation, seaborne and aerospace navigation, guidance, and control applications. In that regard, interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes (“fiber optic gyroscopes”) are now being used as angular rate sensors for numerous aviation and aerospace applications, such as inertial navigation and guidance, platform stabilization, deductive reckoning, and motion detection and control. Notably, fiber optic gyroscopes are increasingly being used in inertial navigation and guidance applications, because of their ruggedness, compactness, and ability to sense very low rotation rates (problematic for other electronic gyroscopes), especially for such applications where external navigation cues are unavailable or impractical to use. Advantageously, fiber optic gyroscopes can be made quite small, and are constructed to withstand considerable mechanical shock, temperature changes, and other environmental extremes. Also, due to an absence of moving parts, fiber optic gyroscopes are nearly maintenance free and economical in cost to use.
However, notwithstanding the above-described advantages of fiber optic gyroscopes and similar types of electronic gyroscopes, a significant problem that arises in this field is that electronic gyroscopes, compared to the traditional spinning mass-based gyroscopes, do not measure any change if there is a loss of power. For example, fiber optic gyroscopes need to have power applied all of the time, because if power to the fiber optic components is lost, then the fiber optic gyroscope becomes completely inoperable until power to those components is reapplied. Consequently, if there is a loss of power in an aircraft's or spacecraft's navigation system using a fiber optic gyroscope, the fiber optic gyroscope (and similar types of electronic gyroscopes) will be inoperable during that period and unable to sense any movement or rotational change. For example, if such a power disruption were to occur for a relatively short period in a commercial aircraft, it would be extremely important to know where the aircraft traveled during that period of blind flight. Unfortunately, the existing fiber optic gyroscope sensor systems (and similar electronic gyroscope sensors) are unable to recover that missing data. As such, this problem has a significant negative impact on flight safety, navigation and/or space mission success, and also diminishes the potential operational and cost advantages of the electronic gyroscopes being used. Therefore, a substantial need exists for an electronic gyroscope sensor system (e.g., fiber optic gyroscope sensor system) that can resolve the above-described power disruption problem and other similar problems. As described in detail below, the present invention provides a linear adaptive prediction system and method for recovering lost data in, for example, a fiber optic gyroscope sensor system, which resolves the power disruption problems encountered with existing fiber optic gyroscopes and other similar prior art electronic gyroscopes.